Editorial: 'No Child Left Behind' gets an 'F'

The federal government last week denied California's request to get a waiver from the increasingly impossible-to-meet goals of the old No Child Left Behind Act. That means a really lousy grade for education throughout the Golden State.

And this is one time Californians can say for sure that a teacher is at fault for our lousy grade.

The reason for the feds' denial falls almost entirely on an outdated stand by the state's teachers unions: They do not want teachers to be evaluated -- even in part -- on how well their students do on standardized tests. That's absurd. Their students' academic achievement absolutely matters to their overall success as a teacher.

So California is stuck with No Child Left Behind, an out-of-date mandate from Washington, D.C., that is a classic case of good intentions gone awry. The George W. Bush-era law was intended as both a carrot and a stick that would provide troubled public school systems with achievement goals and incentives for reaching them.

That was fine in its time and place, and the prodding worked on a national level for a while. But NCLB has reached an almost comical extreme. The law has always required that a certain percentage of students test "proficient" in English and math. That percentage has increased every year. By 2014, which is just around the corner, the nation will "require" that every student -- including the learning-disabled, poor and English learners -- must reach "proficiency."

It won't happen. One hundred percent perfection among the millions of American schoolchildren -- what were President Bush and congressional lawmakers thinking when they signed off on that utopian goal?

Standardized tests, fine in their place as a barometer of students' achievements, are simply not the be-all and end-all of American education their proponents have pretended them to be. But they are one important indicator. And the quality of the teaching that students get certainly has something to do with how they perform on tests. Just as students should not be judged simply on how well they take those tests, teachers should not be judged simply on how well their various students -- some of them gifted, some of them not very teachable -- perform on those standardized tests.

But teachers ought to be judged to some degree on how well their students do. It's a reasonable part of what should be a many-faceted evaluation process. So the teachers union insistence that student achievement not be considered at all when evaluating a teacher is a stubborn and selfish stand with real consequences for all of California.

No Child Left Behind has become a problem. But what's worse is the unions' position that keeps California stuck with it, given its current unreachable goals.